We had a lovely vacation at the beach, thank you for asking. I’ll post my summer in photos soon, and I’m a bit sniffy about our last day at the pool today.

For tonight, though, I want to look forward. And forward looks pretty durn good, if my latest craft project is any indication.

Very, very loyal readers of this wee blog (all 2 of you) may recall an early post in which I extolled the fun to be had at thrift stores, and laid out some aspirationally helpful guidelines to ensure your thrift experience is as enviro as it can be.

Why do I care about thrifting? All this organic, sustainably raised, solid wood nonsense I love comes with a hefty pricetag, and you have to save money somewhere. So Maya rarely has new clothes on her small body, unless a Grandma gave them to her. Instead, she ruins a buck-fitty jumper most days of the week, which is A-ok with me. (And there are good environmental sustainability reasons not to buy new clothes, as a great piece by Tom Philpott, Are Your Skinny Jeans Starving the World?, made clear last week.) I love the idea of re-use, and children’s clothing, toys and books, with its expiration date of tomorrow, are perfect places to recycle.

And I’ll confess here and now to being a competitive yard saler. There’s many a Saturday morn I’m dashing about my suburban hood to beat other competi-moms to the few wooden toys out there, somewhere. There’s not much I like better these days than a really gorgeous toy for a dollar. Which is pretty sad, I know. I’m sorry to saddle you with that information, really. (You can forget it now, and enjoy your Saturdays over coffee and the paper while I’m out chasing the dream.)

I also love it when I come across a small, do-able craft project at a thrift store or yard sale — an item that begs me to take it home and craft it up a bit. Such was the moment when I first laid eyes on this plain, kinda’ fugly wooden house at my local Value Village for a cool ten dollars. 

I just knew that its destiny was to be a much nicer establishment, in the marginally better neighborhood of my house. I had some old paint (Mythic, zero-VOC) hanging around from the samples I used for Maya’s room, and figured that a little sandpaper, a judicious amount of love and a generous helping of brown paint to cover the scarred rooftops would be enough to make it spring to life as a flipped home.

In addition to the $10 on the house itself, I spent likely $15 on paint and supplies.

The brushes and sandpaper, as well as most of the paint, can also be used on future projects. For painting the brown roof, I also used Mythic paint, which I recommend and like, though it only comes in a matte finish.

Since the wood had nice markings on the sides and vertical surfaces, but was lousy on the roof and floors, that was my guide.

The first step was to use the rough sandpaper to even out the rooftop and smooth the edges on the roof to a more pleasing shape. This actually didn’t take long at all.

Next, I mopped it down to get the dust and dirt off with an old cloth diaper (because it was lint-free-ish). And taped up the windows, because I envisioned them in the light blue we had left over from when we decided to use a different blue in Maya’s bedroom.

Maya did her own watercolor painting while all this was ongoing.

After gingerly dabbing on blue on the window panes with the smallest brush, inside and out, I hit the two floors of the house with an off-white, also left-over from a project. They needed two coats to be convincing, but it eventually worked.

Last, I painted the roof brown, which also benefited from a second coat the next day.

When all the paint had dried, I used the fine sandpaper to clean up the painted areas, then rubbed organic flaxseed oil with a cloth into the remaining unpainted wood. The oil created a nice color that showed off the variations in the wood.

Finally, I took a small scrap of gorgeous organic fabric left over from Maya’s absurdly nice quilt that I had made on Etsy (from this wonderful company, no commission), and made a curtain for the doggy door by nailing it into the house. For organic doggies only (LOL).

I let the oil and paint dry for the week we were at the beach, and there was little odor from either, really, even from the start.

Basically, Martha Stewart has nothin’ on me. Seriously, I recommend this kind of tinkering. It was a terrific, small and fun project. Maya points to the brown roof and says, “painting,” so its clear that she knows it was hand-finished for her. And now she has a cheap new dollhouse, finished with a little care, that even matches the tones in her bedroom.

These days, her bunnies mostly live in it, with their faces squished awkwardly out through the upstairs windows, but I have high hopes that others might move in someday.